Just one year after winning her second Tony Award as Best Actress in a Play, Mary-Louise Parker is ready for her third, reprising with David Morse the roles they premiered 25 years ago in How I Learned to Drive, Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize winning play.

Parker, who has won two Golden Globes – for the TV movie Angels in America in 2004 and the TV series Weeds in 2006 – among five nominations, has found a place for herself as a respected actress of stage, TV and occasional movies.

Defying time, age and the odds in Broadway, this season Parker is again playing the same character – a woman called Li’l Bit reflecting, through non-chronological flashbacks, on years of sexual abuse suffered at the hands of her charming Uncle Peck (Morse), who also taught her how to drive.

When the play originally opened off Broadway in 1997, Ben Brantley (The New York Times) called it “angry and compassionate; light-handed and devastating.” Of course, a lot has happened in the world in the last 25 years, but this play talked all those years ago about what now seems somewhat common after the #MeToo movement. “As surely as death and taxes, stories about sexual abuse continue to multiply,” wrote author Vogel for the Playbill program last March.

She also thanked her leading actors: “Mary-Louise Parker and David Morse, who were fearless in taking on these roles without denial or defense, and who together onstage urged each other to go deeper and deeper with every performance.”

“Aspects of [the play] are quite heavy. Paula (Vogel) says it’s about the gifts from people who hurts us, and learning to forgive yourself,” said Parker last April on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “Sometimes we blame ourselves when other people hurt us and it’s about learning how to let go of that.”

Although Morse is also playing the same demanding character again, somehow it looks more impressive in the case of Parker, in an industry that does not normally treat women with equal respect and consideration when it comes to reprise roles, especially if more than two decades have passed.

“My working theory is that the Friedman (New York’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre) has a fountain of youth stashed somewhere backstage; I don’t have another explanation for Parker’s agelessness. She’s a knowing adult reflecting on the sexual abuse she endured, a shrinking child, a coquettish yet whip-smart 17-year-old; Parker acts her way through decades of Li’l Bit’s trauma with astute choreography. Li’l Bit hunches and shuffles self-consciously or ambles around with loose, swinging limbs – every physicality a statement on her relationship to her body. At her most vulnerable she seems to fold into herself like a work of origami, hinging at the waist, tucking a bent knee beneath her, clutching her legs to her chest,” wrote the critic Maya Phillips last April in The New York Times.

Parker is not the typical “fashion” actress, much less a stage diva. Because of her father’s career as a judge who served in the U.S. Army, she spent parts of her childhood in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, as well as in Thailand, Germany, and France.

She majored in drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (1986), and just four years later debuted on Broadway, earning her first Tony nomination as leading actress with the play Prelude to a Kiss (1990). She writes as well: since 2007 she has contributed articles to Esquire magazine, and in 2015 published her memoir, Dear Mr. You.

Along with these achievements, Parker was honored in 2013 for her work with Hope North, an organization that works in the educating and healing of young victims of Uganda’s civil war (1986–1994), after adopting a baby girl from Ethiopia. In 2017, she also participated in a charity dinner for veteran victims of post-traumatic stress disorder organized by the David Lynch Foundation, with Tom Hanks.

At the moment, not a few critics are betting on Parker to get her third Tony, which would be her second in a row. The production is also nominated for Best Revival of a Play, and Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play (Morse).

This year the Tony Awards will be hosted on June 12 by Ariana DeBose, recent winner of the Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story.